Alberta government urges farmers to prepare for fire evacuations

With wildfires continuing to rage across the province, a senior official with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry is warning farmers and ranchers they should have emergency plans in place in case of evacuation.

“If it’s just you living in town, you grab your important things, if you’ve got kids, you grab your kids, you jump in your vehicle, you drive away. You can do that in 25, 30 minutes. Tough to do that on a farm with a couple hundred head,” said Andres.

“Just getting out and giving the animals a chance to run loose in the pasture is gonna take you 15 to 20 minutes. And, then you still have to get your family out of there.”

Producers in regions where fires are close by should contact their county to find out what the plan is in case evacuation orders are issued. The counties, he stressed, “have a really good sense of what the fire risks are.”

The province has also developed an Alberta Wildfire app and an Emergency Alerts app – both of which Andres said producers should make sure they download onto their smartphones.

“If they stay on top of the warnings, if they stay on top of the notices, they’ll have more time to react.”

Meanwhile, Andres said farmers and ranchers who may want to evacuate their animals should “start making arrangements…as opposed to waiting for it to be organized in the heat of the moment.”

“If I’m making my own plan for my herd, I’m going to want to take them to someone I know. Someone I know [who] has pasture. We can have an arrangement of sharing feed – I’m not worried about biosecurity as much,” Andres said, adding transportation needs should also be considered.

As of Wednesday morning, there were 16 active fires across Alberta, with two considered out of control. Four new fires have started in the past 24 hours.

Some of those fires – notably the fire near Fox Creek, in the province’s northwest and the fire near the British Columbia/Alberta border – are close to major agricultural areas, Andres said.

“Those are the ones that we’re really watching because there’s a large agricultural industry out there.”

Seventeen farms and ranches, Andres said, are located in the Little Smoky area – about 250 kilometres northwest of Edmonton – where a two-hour evacuation notice remains in effect.

In all, there are approximately 2,000 large animals (mostly cattle) in the region and 1,000 poultry, Andres said, adding county officials have also made note of one bison and one hog operation.

On Sunday night, when a mandatory evacuation order was temporarily put in place, residents and county officials managed to move 400 cattle north to Valleyview. Some of the animals were move to provincial pastureland, while others were trailered to the Valleyview Agriculture Grounds.

However, efforts to evacuate more livestock, he explained, were challenged because some operations in the region are still calving – which makes it difficult to move the animals. “You don’t want to be doing that.”

In cases where animals cannot be moved and an evacuation order has been issued, Andres said owners will be escorted back to their operations “every couple of hours,” to check on their animals, so long as conditions are safe.